


Gorgon

by Bookah



Series: Mythic Women [2]
Category: Original Work
Genre: Feminism, Greek Mythology - Freeform, Mythical Beings & Creatures
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-11
Updated: 2018-06-11
Packaged: 2019-05-20 21:47:24
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,795
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14902632
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Bookah/pseuds/Bookah
Summary: If she was a monster, she'd been made that way. Justice was a concept for the fortunate. A retelling of the myth of Medusa





	Gorgon

Eyes stared at her from statues half-hidden in the dark shadows of the passageway. Onyx orbs in marble faces accused her silently. “Murderer”, they seemed to say. “Harlot. Hideous monster.”

If she was a monster, it was because they had made her so. The hordes of men in their sun-bright armor sailing to the cave in which she had sought refuge, the Athenians in their city of marble… even the very gods themselves, they had all made her into a monster.

“Medusa.”

She turned to see her eldest sister, Stheno, standing beside one of the statues, an arm resting on it. The red snakes that had replaced her hair writhed around her head, brushing off the porcine tusks protruding between her lips. A snake wrapped around her waist, buckling her garment closed and hiding her skin. Once mediterranean dark, Stheno was now a creature of bronze.

Beside Stheno stood Euryale. Younger than Stheno, but older than Medusa, she had been treated no better than her sisters. Golden skinned but with the same tusks, the snakes on her head were ebon in color. Her head was turned downward, unwilling to meet the gaze of either of her sisters.

Gazing at them was yet another reminder of what had been done to her. She had suffered through the agonizing warping of her golden locks into hideous yellow snakes. Her skin had become silver in hue. The three sisters who had once been beauties of Athens had been metamorphosed into gorgons.

The statues surrounding them testified to what happened to those who gazed on that hideous transformation. They had been men once. Men who had met the eyes of a gorgon became stone statues whose last expression of horror and hate was locked into their immutable stares.

“Medusa,” Stheno repeated. Her face was cross, an expression made worse by its hideous transformation. “You’re brooding again. Go get some fresh air.”

“Please,” Euryale agreed, her whisper loud enough to strike dust from the crevices of the cave. “You haven’t been outside in days.”

“I don’t wish to,” Medusa responded petulantly.

“Do it anyway,” Stheno snapped.

Euryale laid her clawed hand gently on Stheno’s arm, then stepped towards Medusa. “It’s just that we’re worried about you. You know how Stheno gets when she worries.”

Medusa sighed. “I know. I’ll go outside for a bit.”

Her sisters looked relieved as she turned toward the exit.

The beach that spread out before their cave was cold comfort. Though fiery Helios shone down from his chariot on high, the warmth of his passage and the heat of the sand could not overcome the chilling sight of the bones scattered about on the strand. 

Not all of the heroes that had come seeking her head had become stone.  Medusa and Euryale may have preferred petrification, but Stheno had other ways to deal with invaders. Many warriors had failed to even reach the cave where the Gorgons lived before being struck down by her bow. The eldest of the three sisters did not blame Medusa for their shared fate, but she was no less bitter for it. Her zest in protecting her sisters was frightening to behold.

The crash of the waves on the beach brought no more comfort than the feel of the sun on her shoulders. Perhaps Stheno and Euryale could still find some sort of solace in the sound, but to Medusa the roar of the waves mocked her. Poseidon ruled the waves, and it was his voice that they echoed. Above all else, she despised Poseidon the most. Despised, and feared.

Was there any other way to feel about one’s rapist?

Medusa turned inland, desperate to escape the cruel laughter she heard in the sound of the waves, and the memories they forced to the surface. The interior of Sarpedon was quite different than its beaches. The wet, sea-ripe air was replaced by dry breezes that rustled the limbs of pine trees and wild olives. Sap and flowers filled the air with cloying perfume. Here, at least, was something wholesome that Medusa could feel a moment of peace with.

That illusion of peace was short lived. She heard the shrill cries of alarmed birds and turned her head toward the sound just in time to see him land.

A branch snapped beneath the sandals the intruder wore as he landed.  Feathered wings folded back, finished with the task of carrying him aloft. She sighed, knowing those sandals all too well, even if she didn’t recognize the youth wearing them. Only one set of sandals granted the power to fly, and only one god possessed them.

Hermes was the youthful brother of Athena. It was his purpose to deliver messages between the gods, a task made easy by the swiftness his sandals granted him. His arrival could only mean that he’d brought her a message. Given what the gods had done to her and her sisters, she doubted it would be a welcome one.

A flash of sunlight drew her eyes to the shield the young man wore. She swore softly as she took in the appearance of the thing. There could be no mistaking the shield of Athena. If Hermes was carrying it, then doubtless his message was from the goddess herself, the bronze metal disk proof of the authority with which Hermes spoke.

Medusa stepped out of the sheltering shadow of the pine forest and turned to confront the youth. “What do you want, brother of Athena?” she spat. “Are you here to taunt me on her behalf? To curse me further? What more can that cruel monster do to me, or my sisters, than she has already done?”

She heard the young man chuckle. He turned the shield as it was strapped onto his arm, and she could see his face reflected off its surface. His eyes met hers in its polish, and she felt a chill run down her spine as she met the gaze of someone other than her sisters for the first time in ages.

“Brother of Athena?” the young man chuckled. “Oh, no. I am not Hermes. I am Perseus, the son of Zeus and Danae. The sandals were given to me by Hermes to aid my quest. Athena granted me this shield, and the sword I bear was crafted by Hephaestus himself.”

The shock washed over Medusa, and she found herself as petrified as any of the heroes in the caves beneath her feet. Many had come seeking fame in her death. All of them had perished, slain by Stheno, or Euryale, or even by Medusa herself. But none of them had been equipped by the gods themselves, nor had any boasted quite the lineage Perseus had just laid claim to.

The boy, still looking at her in the reflective surface of Athena’s shield, slowly slid sideways towards her. “Pray,” he crooned. “Pray for the forgiveness of the gods for your sins.”

Her sins. What sins had she ever committed that she had been brought to this?

She remembered the time when she was a ten year old girl, still years from her first blood, Two loud voices debated the sexual merits of her tiny body. Their laughter when she had fled in terror, and the way their musings had been simply the first in a long litany of abuse she would endure.

The time when, as a thirteen year old at a festival, a rough young man had tugged down her tunic. Her barely budding breasts were exposed to the crowd, and they had laughed at her torment. Her humiliation and tears had burned her as she’d struggled to find some place where she could fix her garments.

Her anger when a jealous girl her own age accused her of using her looks to curry favor. The suggestion that she spread her legs for any bauble or trinket had stabbed deeply. That it came from another girl, from someone who should have known what it was like to be treated as a thing for men to pleasure themselves with, made the betrayal a wound even deeper than all the jeers and taunts of men.

The quiet sorrow when men came visiting her father, and not her, because they only cared to win his approval, and not hers, as the means to bed her. The knowledge that she was being bartered over like a cow by her own father left her wishing she had been born a boy, when no other injury to her sex had accomplished such a bitter desire.

The desperation with which she turned to the Temple of Athena Nike in Athens, begging and pleading to be allowed to become a temple virgin, the only place she believed she would be safe from the lust of men.

The feeling of utter helplessness and pain that overwhelmed her when Poseidon plunged his cock into her, tearing her flesh as he laughed at her cries for him to stop. Knowing that even the power of her position as a priestess in a temple dedicated to virginity had been no protection, and that Poseidon delighted in defiling her on the very floor of that sanctuary.

The utter despair she felt as she realized that it was she, and not Poseidon, that Athena blamed, that Poseidon would suffer no punishment for his act of rape, but she that would bear the burden of condemnation. Worse, the guilt she felt while watching her sisters suffer through the agony of being transformed into monsters for daring to suggest Athena’s wrath was misplaced.

Her sins. Her womanhood. Her existence as a mere object in the eyes of gods and men...

“No,” she hissed, as rage replaced her fear. “The gods do not deserve my prayer. No one deserves it.”

She thrust herself forward, striking like the adder her body had been transformed into, wanting to tear the man before her into pieces, to watch as his flesh turned to stone and as the blood of his broken body became sapphires before they finished falling to earth. She burned with the need to avenge herself on this most recent of insults.

There was a flash of light, and a strange tugging on her neck that caused her to pause. She could see, reflected in the shield, an expression of triumph on the young man’s face.

And then she was tumbling, and her head was turning in a way she had not meant for it to twist as her vision briefly saw her body moving away from her before fading to black. She could hear Euryale’s shriek as loud as thunder, feel the earth shake at the haste of Stheno’s charge, and the tug as her severed head was snatched up by the boy to be shoved in a sack...


End file.
